Curse of the terrace tweets

Experts from Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University (RGU) have taken to Twitter to find out more about how football fans express themselves.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found supporters like to swear a lot, with more than one in 20 tweets about the beautiful game containing profanities.

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But researchers also concluded swearing by football fans is elaborate and nuanced.

Supporters were more likely to use bad language in a positive context than when something goes wrong in a match. Liverpool fans were found to be the most prolific with profanities after the study looked at tweets about English Premier League over three consecutive Saturdays.

Collating an average of just in excess of 125,000 tweets during the allotted analysis period on each match day, they found almost 6500 (5%) contained the two most common swear words.

Study co-author Dr Emma Byrne said: "It's no secret that football fans like to swear. But what's surprising is how and why they swear."

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